It’s biscuit week in the Bake Off tent, and the heat is properly on this time round (well, not in one of the baker’s ovens, as it turns out…). We’re talking gas mark nine here: episode two rolls out a brand new set of bakes screaming "Creative thinking!" instead of last week’s traditional recipes – good for comfort food, but not much else.

The signature challenge asks for 24 identical biscotti (a twice-baked Italian biscuit) that have to land in the golden middle of crispiness, finding that happy medium between overly-doughy and inedible hardness. This makes me wince in anticipation of a mass-production version of last week’s unexciting signature Madeira cakes. However, the biscotti seem to have whetted the contestants’ appetite for exotic ingredients: Ugne dips her goji berry biscotti in white wine, Dorret adds amber sugar crystals to hers, and Mary Berry has never even heard of the jackfruit flavouring Alvin’s Philippine-inspired creations.

The technical challenge rises to a whole new level in comparison to last week’s walnut cake (I say "rises"; one of the challenges here is to keep the bake flat… excuse me for my pedantry). Arlettes are introduced as a “a high-end, light, delicate, cinnamon-flavoured biscuit”, but for the purposes of the technical challenge they are essentially a waiting game requiring better than perfect timing. The dough has to be chilled before being turned (this has to happen multiple times) so that the butter doesn’t melt in the folding process; and, once in the oven, they can burn very quickly because of their high butter content. For one of the bakers, burning her biscuits is not even a remote threat: this week’s big The Great British Bake Off’s drama sees Marie-the-Star-Baker-from-last-week fail to set her oven on a high enough heat, leaving her with only half the number of Arlettes required.

However, it is in the final round where the amateur bakers’ creativity is truly proven. Mary and Paul demand 36 identical biscuits in a biscuit box and the bakers deliver these in the most blissful biscuity forms: Tamal offers a French jewellery and games box, both Flora and Matt cut out tea-bag shaped tea-flavoured biscuits, and Ugne sets out to carve a baby climbing into her box to steal its contents. Paul the contestant verges on the overly cutesy: his box is filled with pink macaroons for his wife and is decorated with iced pictures of himself as a Coldstream Guard. And I never thought biscuits could be too sweet.

Biscuit week is Bake Off at its best. There’s creativity, there’s an overload of yumminess (I’m happy to confess that my pre-Bake Off dinner included three lemon meringue pies because otherwise I would not have survived the episode with a fridge empty of sweets), and there’s drama (the horror in Nadiya’s eyes when she says she’ll go down making fortune cookies makes me want to give her a hug. Or a comfort biscuit).

The only fault this week is the largely absent innuendo from Mel and Sue. But I guess sometimes that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.